Christine Hume

EXCERPT FROM THE SATURATION PROJECT Little Red Riding Hood shares her color with the wolf, who has red eyes. As does, the Cambodian woman who emerged in 2008 from the Rattanakiri jungle, one of the world’s great wildernesses, after eighteen lost years. This jungle was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the 1960s and repeatedly B52ed by America, stirring up animosity that led to the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in the 1970’s. Perhaps she was a child of refugees hiding there, unaware that the war’s over. A man claims to be the woman’s father, identifies her by scars on her wrist. The father described his first sight of her: “naked and scuttling like a money…. Her eyes were red like a tiger’s eyes.” At night in the father’s home, she is restless, awake, mumbling an animal-jungle tongue, her eyes reddened to adapt to the dark. Eyes shining like stars. The red, long, lowing of a star losing its heat—its calor—and receding from earth.   Emily Dickinson describes her eyes, “like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves,” in a letter to Higginson (July 1862). Spent eyes, fiery, frayed, infra-rayed after sleepless weeks, I wake up feeling as if I have had a nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I hear voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind through speakers: freak agitation, vehement presence, uncertainty. I become light; unbearable weight of everything around me. I am lifted tenderly, I am upheld. I rest my head against a pillow or an arm, and feel easy. It is night and someone displaced me from fire. Heat and hues shift and clash. True: some women’s eyes have two different red pigments, uniquely enabling them to see whole new spectrums of color. Imperceptible to others and carried on the X chromosome, these double-red eyes go round seeing things.     If red were to fall asleep, it would dream of its opposite. Red runs ahead and cannot wait for White, who is blank today. She was adopted into the name, she says; White doesn’t know her biological last name. White plays the piano and sings the last four Rosicrucian aphorisms, about red and white medicine. Do you need to be cured? The body is a machine that produces red by itself. If red were to wake after a two hundred year sleep, it would find itself the object of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Red doesn’t bifurcate reality into subject and object; no: the word runs red: “Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question.” The question hawked up like blood, leaves your mouth salivating.     She attempted to escape three times back into the jungle, but each time was brought back to her father. After three months of attempted domestication, she escaped back into forest. His behavior never changed and he made unsuccessful attempts to escape until his death. The boy had been spotted years before and even captured, but had used all his animal cunning to escape. The girl managed to remove the board nailed over the window and make her escape. However, whenever they passed a jungle area, the boy tried to escape. She escaped eighteen times. When his caretaker returned from a trip, he discovered that the boy had run off and was not found again.     Every night between ages three and five, my daughter asks me to tell her stories of rage and jealousy as her bedtime fare. I run out of stories, quickly tiring of my own emotional vacillations between urges for belonging and escape. Think of a story to give her, think. As if abandonment were simply a way to be found, I tell her about Kamala, the feral girl in India raised by wolves and brought to live in a human orphanage at age eight. Her human father’s diary notes: June 18, 1927: She always preferred red clothes to those of any other color. …and if the children meddled with her in finding her clothes, she used to get wild. March 17, 1927: She quietly began collecting all the red dolls from the line which the children had arranged. The children were annoyed and made a clamor, and ran to complain to Mrs. Singh against Kamala. By the time Mrs. Singh could come, Kamala had remove the toys to a corner in the next room, and stood there. When the children complained, pointing to her, she simply began to move to her corner; Mrs. Sing followed her, and when they approached the corner, Kamala herself pointed to the toys heaped in that corner. Ms. Singh thereupon patted Kamala and said, “Oh,! You want all those red dolls. Very good, I will get you some new red dolls. Give these back to them.” Kamala at once obeyed. She did not leave Mrs. Sing’s company till…the order for red dolls was given….Her red dolls came, and Kamala took them all to her corner, and covered them with a piece of cloth and went away to the kitchen. In the photograph, shadow furs her skin. Then nothing remained of her fur but red.     The paranoia of reference engines my invention. Involuntary emissions, phantom dialogues, organs taking turns and discharging dreams each night. I dream I am on a city rooftop making wings with only red feathers. A man in the dream tells me that I’ll need white to fly. Then I remember I need only concentrate to fly, and do so. When I find the extra room in my dream, it is teaming with sick deer. I try to blow up their limp bodies like balloons. The room is always there, differently furnished, when I dream and I am always surprised to find it, but I recognize it at once. It’s been there all along, this room where dreams themselves live, inaccessible to the wakeful-self. I dream that when I look away from the Emerald Room, I see a sprawling Ruby Room on a hill like an attic. I walk toward it, but realize it is the wrong red. I am looking through my red umbrella, the one Nietzsche used to shield his failing eyes at the end of his life. All the dreams I don’t remember, I wake up blind to them, but they circulate, they make me a machine. When I speak of dreams I can only speak through memory as if there were a difference. Napoleon dreams recurrently of a red dwarf prophet. Indeed, colorless red ideas sleep furiously. Do you imagine you prefer black and white?     I run after her. I lope up the stairs, following fast. Once she turns around to look at me, I’m terrified. I drop my weapon, forget my secret. I hate her for being human when she turns around. I can’t think of who might be chasing her like this if she is not an animal. And if she is not a mirror, then “ …I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it” (Anne Carson).     I do not have my childhood Little Red Riding Hood costume in mind, when I dress up again in college on Halloween. Nonetheless, I wear red from wig to cowboy boots—glue some plastic flies on me and call myself a scab or an open wound depending on who I’m talking to. Can you separate the costume from the face it extends? “The surfaces of clothing are facial,” says Alphonso Lingis, the philosophy professor whose house I entered between two eyes—the front door opening like a nose between two sides of a sleeping porch filled with huge cockatoos. To enter into the nose is to become a smell. (Had you hoped to smell like roses?) To smell blood is to know vulnerability and decide which side of it you are on.     The human being is the only animal that domesticates itself. To the extent to which it is possible not to my daughter eats meat and runs away to live in the forest. “I want to eat a dead animal.” She sets her teeth on my arm, “Remember when I used to suck your boobs?” She eats meat so the animal is safe inside her; at night she says she will wrap herself in a sheepskin when she escapes. And she will escape; it’s her favorite part in our play. When I ask her what she wants to escape from, she moves—claws bared, jaw-jutted, terrible-eyed—into nowhere without end. Playing hide-and-seek, she becomes as invisible as an animal, invisible mantichora. She is unfindable. Or the found girl savors her relationship with the unfound.     The mantichora, Pliny the Elder tells, has three sets of teeth, “with the face and ears of a man, with red eyes, of colour sanguine, bodied like a lion, and having a tail armed with a sting like a scorpion: His voice resembleth the noise of a flue and trumpet together: very swift he is, and man’s flesh of all others he most desireth.” It is difficult to see with red eyes; rather, it is difficult to be certain that red isn’t appropriating everything it draws near. What doesn’t begin in and emerge from it, dripping? Mocha Dick was a real albino whale in the Pacific whose eyes flashed with untamed brightness; this 19th century whale inspired Moby Dick. The albinistic has red eyes because all you see is blood in the eyes. No pigment covers the iris. When an albino cries, a visual ocean irrupts between the eye and what the eye wants.       - - - - - -

Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry-most recently Shot (Counterpath, 2009)-and a chapbook, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). She is coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.